How to Believe Ghost Stories

A new article  How to Believe Ghost Stories by Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin.

I'm jus' gonna comment as I read it (I reserve my more detailed critiques in my other blog and this is only a popular piece against "ghosts"). 

He says:

Experience, after all, doesn’t always match reality.

It does the vast majority of the time.  Personally, I cannot think when any experience of mine. at least as an adult, didn't match up to reality.

How many times have you felt your phone vibrate in your pocket, only to realize you didn’t actually get a text?

Never, although people rarely call me.  But that would be the very vaguest of impressions.  It cannot be compared to a person seeming to be in front of you that just looks like a person is really there, but in fact is an apparition.

The results of induced hallucination studies, for example, may provide a window through which we can better understand what’s going on with ghost stories. In both cases, we have reason to think that what people perceive is influenced by their prior expectations.

That's the same for all of our normal everyday perceptions too (see this blog post of mine).  What we see is moulded and shaped by prior expectations.  Says nothing against a real object being out there though.

Accepting the supernatural explanation requires accepting the truth of things we can’t, even in principle, measure or observe.

I wonder if the author accepts that others are conscious?  Consciousness cannot be seen or observed.  Indeed, it can't even be inferred if the world is physically closed as the mainstream academic opinion holds.

Immediately after he says:

It requires giving up on the explanatory completeness of science.

Apart from what he labels "ghosts" or any other anomalous phenomenon, there was never any reason to accept the explanatory completeness of science in the first place.  Science only explains the quantifiable aspects of reality.  To suppose it explains the totality of reality is like imagining that metal detectors detect everything that exists (see this blog post by me here).

Science has been enormously successful in catching up with the apparently unexplainable, and it won’t stop.

Meaning that if current scientific laws do not accommodate some phenomenon, then a new theory is dreamt up that explains all that the hitherto theory did, but also explains this new phenomenon.  But any new phenomenon is always something that is objective and material.  In, say, the past 100 years, what hitherto paranormal phenomenon has science explained?

Even if we accept that this man knew his dentures were put in the drawer by granting that he was, for a time, a disembodied mind, the supernaturalist then has to explain how this mind could function in connection with this same body both before and after the NDE. Most of what this man has seen in his life, he’s seen through his eyeballs. Team Science reminds us that we know something about how a physical brain receives visual inputs from physical eyeballs. How does a nonphysical mind receive visual inputs from physical eyeballs? Team Supernatural still faces the task of explaining how the physical and nonphysical can interact.

Until the believer in ghosts can provide a compelling explanation for this.

I have, and will give the links to my relevant blog posts in a sec.  Just to say, the question makes no sense since what he labels "team supernatural" hold (or ought to hold) that vision isn't caused by anything, it's innate to the mind or soul. See 1.  How could we see, hear, taste, touch and smell during an "out of body experience" (OBE)? 2. Skeptical Inquirer attempts to explain why psi could not possibly exist 3. A Causal Consciousness, Free Will, and Dualism 

A Rope around the Earth

A rope is put around the equator all the way around the earth. The rope length is increased by a yard. If we pull it to make another very slightly bigger circle with the rope, how high will the rope be above the Earth?

My initial thought (and surely yours too), is that it would be utterly insignificant. Much less than 1 mm as a yard is so incredibly small compared to the circumference of the earth! But apparently, it's 5.73 inches. Eh, wtf?? But it's correct.

Watch this video.

The narrator says we are convinced by the rope because we can offer a proof. But we can't offer a proof in politics, or philosophy etc. Since, without a proof, we would be wrong about the rope, how can we have good reason to be convinced in our political or philosophical views?

I'm not convinced at all by his argument. I don't think we can conclude that because mathematics confuses people, that this applies in all areas. Also, we don't need a proof in the rope example. Yes, increasing the length of the rope by 1 yard is utterly trivial compared to the circumference of the earth. So how can the rope be 5.73 inches above the earth? It's because 5.73 inches is equally trivially small compared to the radius of the earth! In another words, we have a miniscule increase in the length of the circumference. But also a minuscule increase in the radius. So nothing puzzling here and we can see this without a proof.

How cute!

I wondered what I was seeing initially. Would certainly put people off their meat (which, of course, would be a good thing for a few reasons).

Our task must be to free ourselves...
By widening our circle of compassion
To embrace all living creatures
And the whole of nature and it’s beauty.

Albert Einstein pic.twitter.com/RUESytgKma

— Ramblings (@ramblingsloa) October 9, 2021

The problem with Facebook

I've inked out the names.

Both of the above I posted yesterday on Facebook and took screenshots of each around 10 hours after the original postings. One of the posts is utterly banal -- I found a spider in my sink -- the other post is the diametric opposite; it is about the bizarre situation we find ourselves in, a Universe that appears to be contrived.

One of the posts attracts a fair few "likes" and comments, the other no comments and just one "like". And yes, predictably enough, it is the banal post that attracted all the comments and virtually all the "likes".

There seems to be a pretty close correlation between how trivial and banal my facebook posts are and the number of "likes" and comments they attract. Posts that I don't put any thought into at all but just post on the spur of the moment, such as 'I've just had a drink or 'I've just found a spider', or whatever, seem to invariably attract the most attention.  Contrariwise, my more profound, thought provoking and interesting posts, attract zero comments and even zero "likes", at least most of the time.

I don't know why this is.  Perhaps with my more thoughtful posts people don't know what the heck I'm talking about?  But, surely, regardless of whether they find my thoughtful posts boring or not, people aren't really interested in the trivial banal stuff? If that is indeed so, then the way Facebook organises our newsfeed is a concern.

I read the following article.  It says: 

Facebook’s solution was to create a formula that measured how much “meaningful” interaction a post sparked, then organize the News Feed to encourage as much of that as possible. Under an internal point system used to measure its success, a “like” was worth one point; a reaction, reshare without text or reply to an invite was worth five points; and a significant comment, message, reshare or RSVP, 30 points. Additional multipliers were added depending on whether the interaction was between members of a group, friends or strangers.

This then means the banal, trivial, posts are promoted on peoples newsfeeds so that they see the trivial, banal stuff much more frequently than any thought provoking posts.  And my experience seems to bear this out.  Sometimes over the course of a few days I see the very same posts from people about some completely trivial matter.  Contrariwise, my long and thoughtful posts I never see in my newsfeed.  I assume this is because they do not attract any comments or likes, so the facebook algorithm doesn't promote them.  So most people won't even ever get to see them (but I post some of my more entertaining and thoughtful posts in this blog.  Then there's also my other blog on philosophical issues).

So the situation is that the Facebook algorithm promotes the more banal posts and hides the more thought provoking and interesting posts.  Surely they must be aware that this happens?  There's even a popular meme illustrating this! See below.

So is this a deliberate policy on facebooks part to promote the banal stuff?  Is it advantageous to them?  Or are they just utterly incompetent?